Dream City
Vancouver and the Global Imagination
Book - 2005
Located at the edge of a continent and at the corresponding edge of national public consciousness, Vancouver has developed in unique and unanticipated ways. It is now emerging as an experiment in contemporary city-making, with international interest in Vancouver as a model of post-industrial urbanism increasing exponentially.
Lance Berelowitz explores the links between the city's seductive natural setting, its turbulent political history and changing civic values, and its planning and design culture. He also makes the startling case that Vancouver is to Canada's imagination what Los Angeles is to the American -- a mythologized place of endless possibilities, while being grounded in an altogether more limited set of socio-economic and environmental limitations.
Dream City is richly illustrated with both historical and contemporary photographs of many significant buildings and public spaces, as well as specially commissioned maps that reveal the underlying patterns of growth and change of Canada's youngest metropolis.
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971.133 V22B48d
Opinion
From Library Staff
From Library Staff
A Vancouver Book Award winner that takes a critical view of built forms in our city. The Central Library is recognized as a global icon and a marker for Vancouver's architectural coming of age.
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Add a Comment"Dream City" is pictorial documentation of Vancouver, looking back at its ever-changing appearance (through architecture) over the course of the 20th century.
Personally speaking - I think that Vancouver (just like Burnaby) was so much more attractive 30-40 years ago before this latest wave of the unstoppable "construction boom" got underway and the respect for the preservation of older buildings has now been completely ignored by the myopic-visioned developers of today.
Author, Lance Berelowitz seriously wants to imagine Vancouver as being Canada's Los Angeles. Well - Let me tell ya - If that isn't a nightmare - I don't know what is.
I mean - Let's face it - 35 years ago Vancouver may have had the potential to be a real "dream" city. But, now - It's a living hell (for 2 good reasons).
(1) Greedy, foreign developers (without any foresight) are bulldozing this city's older buildings, left, right, and center. And, these structures are being replaced by massive towers that look good on the surface, but they are rife (under their facade) with shoddy workmanship.
(2) Filthy, mentally unfit street-people lying around on every street corner, regularly breaking into vehicles, and turning the entire downtown core into a literal slum are forcing us (as actual residents) to repeatedly clean up after these parasites who don't give a damn.
Vancouver? - "Dream City"!?..... Ha! - I think - Not!!
architecture of vancouver